Brian Shuve

Research Interests

The Standard Model of particle physics has been one of the most successful theories of all time, culminating in the recent discovery of the Higgs boson. However, it has missing pieces: it accounts for neither the dark matter which dominates the universe's matter content, nor the baryon asymmetry which explains the observed abundance of visible matter. I work on building and understanding models of dark matter and/or baryogenesis, focusing on theories with implications at and below the electroweak scale for a wide range of different high-energy, low-energy, and astrophysical experiments. I am also interested in models where the dynamics of dark matter and baryogenesis are related to one another, such as models of asymmetric dark matter, baryogenesis via interactions with dark matter, and baryogenesis through neutrino oscillations with connections to sterile neutrino dark matter.

In the coming years, it is also important to consider how to maximize the sensitivity of current and planned experiments to physics beyond the Standard Model. This includes looking for physics that is challenging to see at the LHC, either because of large Standard Model backgrounds, or because the experiments are not optimally configured for such signatures. Examples I've worked on and am continuing to study include using properties of jets to enhance sensitivity to hadronic resonances, both in the strongly boosted and resolved regimes, as well as electroweak production of new particles decaying to tau leptons, jets, or invisible states. Thorough surveys of such examples of new physics are important to ensure that collider experiments maximally probe models of physics around the electroweak scale, and determining gaps in LHC coverage provides motivation for a cleaner collider environment, such as a linear collider.